Wayne M. O'Leary

Howard and Hillary

They're the odd couple of the Democratic Party, the political
version of Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, and their simultaneous rise
to prominence speaks volumes about the current schizophrenic state of
the Democrats.

I'm referring, of course, to Howard Dean, wunderkind of last
year's presidential campaign and newly installed chairman of the
Democratic National Committee, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York's
junior senator and presumptive candidate for president in 2008. The
town (Washington) may turn out to be too small for both of them.

Dean is the ultimate provocateur, the fastest lip in the East,
and Democrats presumably knew that when they tapped him for DNC head.
Among his notably controversial comments of recent weeks were
assertions that the GOP is a party made up mostly of "white
Christians" (true; the description applies to 84% of Republicans
versus just 57% of Democrats), that many Republicans have never had
to earn an honest living (true; the GOP's affluent leadership and
activist base relies much more on unearned income from investments
than does its opposite number), and that House Majority Leader Tom
DeLay should hustle himself back to Texas and serve his richly
deserved jail time for political corruption (probably apropos, but
premature in that no actual trial -- or even an indictment -- has
yet taken place).

Needless to say, the national media jumped all over the Vermont
ex-governor, labeling him an irresponsible loose cannon -- or
worse. This was the same national media that for a dozen years prior
found nothing critical to say when Republicans of the Gingrich-DeLay
stripe made statements far more reckless and inflammatory.

It's a double standard the Fourth Estate needs to be called on,
and Dean has done it in the specific case of Fox News; he's not
backing down. The same can't be said for the Democratic congressional
establishment. The party's oh-my-God capital chorus line, led by Sen.
Joe Biden, couldn't wait to condemn Dean, but then, they're part of
the problem.

Although the party establishment doesn't like it, Dean is the
proven antidote to the vapid, uninspired centrism that has dominated
Democratic politics for a generation. As late as 2004, John Kerry ran
for president essentially as a nonideological foreign-policy patriot.
His running mate, John Edwards, was supposed to supply the
progressive fire and brimstone on domestic issues, but the campaign
banished him to Dick Cheney's cave and he was never heard from
again.

In 2008, the centrist oracles, defeated but unrepentant, appear
to want an overtly Christian candidate with red-state appeal. A
Republican-lite strategy didn't work last time, but the Democratic
Leadership Council types and their big-money backers don't discourage
easily; they think they see victory in finding an anti-Dean.

Enter Hillary, the party's 800-pound gorilla (if polls are to be
believed), who will try to fit the DLC's bill without totally
alienating the party's more populist base. Her rightward positioning
has already begun, manifesting itself in firm support for the Iraq
war, in an edging away from social causes like abortion, in an uptick
in antipermissiveness rhetoric and, most especially, in regular
paeans to traditional religious faith and red-state morality. Signs
are abundant that Hillary will run on a centrist platform borrowed
from her husband's years of triangulation. The strategy will involve
keeping DNC Chairman Dean at extreme arm's length.

Sen. Clinton starts with obvious advantages: name recognition, a
high-profile elective position (something John Edwards conspicuously
lacks) and an odd nostalgia for the White House years of the 1990s.
She already has two Democratic constituency groups nearly sewn up:
activist women, eager for a female president regardless of ideology,
and African Americans, who have forgotten Bill Clinton's political
sins (welfare reform, for example, which hit them disproportionately
hard), but cherish the memory of his easy identification with black
culture. Mostly, however, Hillary benefits from the political myth of
the 1990s, the perception that the Clintons presided over
unparalleled good times and can somehow bring them back.

The myth is just that -- a myth. The rising stock market of the
Clinton years, the basis of the myth, was premised on the speculative
dot-com boom that turned into a bubble and burst soon after Bill and
Hillary departed Washington. The jobs created in its wake were
insecure low-pay/low-benefit jobs produced as a byproduct of the
economic creative destruction of the '90s that consumed the
manufacturing sector, helped along by the free-trading,
proglobalization policies of a Clinton administration bent on
cooperating with a laissez-faire Republican Congress.

In actuality, Democrats and their constituencies gained little
from the Clinton era and lost a lot. The party surrendered Congress
and descended into minority status. National health insurance,
Hillary's initial claim to fame, was botched and set back for years.
Labor unions continued their slide, accompanied by little weeping
from the White House. Reactionary economic policies were given a
bipartisan sheen and the stamp of respectability. And any
post-election momentum acquired by Democrats after 1996 was
squandered by a wholly avoidable impeachment crisis.

On the other hand, the Clintons survived and prospered, Hillary
moving to the Senate to lay the groundwork for the restoration and
Bill hitting the lecture circuit, earning big money and hobnobbing
with Republican presidents. It's a depressing tale and one that
suggests a certain inevitability: The Clintons will always be with
us, and the soap opera will never end.

Dick Morris (the pollster and strategist who originally was
Hillary's choice) will be succeeded by some other guru of
triangulation. The long-awaited liberal revival will be once more
postponed or stunted in its growth. Politics will continue to be
bereft of meaning and concerned with empty gestures, symbolic
incrementalism and accommodation.

But there, blocking the way, is Sir Howard, mounted on his white
charger, ready to do battle for truth, justice and the progressive
vision. The Clintons will have to take him into account, because he
possesses the one thing they don't have: the liberal idealism that
defines their party.

Dean won't run again, but he will have a say in who does; he will
set the tone and select the terrain. The Clintons, said to have
vehemently opposed his selection as interim party leader, will view
him as an inconvenient bump on the road to their entitlement, but he
could become a cavernous pothole.